National Reckonings

During the tumultuous years of the English Revolution and Restoration, national crises like civil wars and the execution of the king convinced Englishmen that the end of the world was not only inevitable but imminent. National Reckonings shows how this widespread eschatological expectation shaped nationalist thinking in the seventeenth century. Imagining what Christ's return would mean for England's body politic, a wide range of poets, philosophers, and other writers—including Milton, Hobbes, Winstanley, and Thomas and Henry Vaughan,—used anticipation of the Last Judgment to both disrupt existing ideas of the nation and generate new ones.

Ryan Hackenbracht contends that nationalism, consequently, was not merely a horizontal relationship between citizens and their sovereign but a vertical one that pitted the nation against the shortly expected kingdom of God. The Last Judgment was the site at which these two imagined communities, England and ecclesia (the universal church), would collide. Harnessing the imaginative space afforded by literature, writers measured the shortcomings of an imperfect and finite nation against the divine standard of a perfect and universal community. In writing the nation into end-times prophecies, such works as Paradise Lost and Leviathan offered contemporary readers an opportunity to participate in the cosmic drama of the world's end and experience reckoning while there was still time to alter its outcome.

National Reckonings

"By focusing on the incompatibility of nationhood and Christian universalism, National Reckonings offers a compelling study of the literary imagination and political conflict. The lessons of this historicist study remain urgently important for us now."

- Eric Song, Swarthmore College, and author of Dominion Underserved

National Reckonings

"A work of cultural excavation, National Reckonings—intelligent, inclusive, and incisive—focuses on the Book of Revelation as an index to Protestant beliefs and then brackets its Last Judgment as a key to making political sense of events in Milton’s England. In a century rife with eschatological expectations, not just Milton but Hobbes and Winstanley, Coppe, Thomas and Henry Vaughan, as well as Anna Trapnel, illustrate the multiple ways in which eschatology posed a critique of and

challenge to a nation that had become the emanating center of the expected millennium and of the utopian politics and creative theology that were to be its harbinger. The alpha and the omega of this study, Milton’s writings are shot through with apocalyptic rumblings and yearnings, eschatological immanence and delay, as well as secularizing tendencies, including an optimistic view of human agency and of a world renewing itself, that were to become the gift of Milton and his age to the modern world."